Spreadsheets remain a go-to application in today’s workplace, but depending on how they’re used, they can hamstring efforts to incorporate artificial intelligence into operations, chief information officers say.
As enterprises remain under pressure to leverage generative AI, CIOs say it’s more important than ever to keep their enterprise data properly managed — and the continuing popularity of tools such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets isn’t making the task of managing corporate data any easier, they say.
“Organizations are awash in spreadsheets,” said Frank Sicilia, CIO at enterprise software company Egnyte. “I don’t care what it is that you do for a particular organization, somebody’s got a spreadsheet somewhere.”
Spreadsheets shot up in popularity with the debut of Microsoft Excel in the 1980s, and despite attempts from upstarts, Excel and its ilk remain dominant. Office workers today use tools such as Excel to visualize, analyze, organize, share and present slices of corporate data — either exported from databases or whipped up on the spot.
All these spreadsheets — created, shared, tweaked and retweaked — can result in multiple, conflicting versions of the same data sets living on different employees’ devices, said Bill Cassidy, CIO at life insurer New York Life.
Data, which can include a company’s transaction records, analytics and other types of proprietary information, is considered to be the backbone of any AI model. That’s because that data is used to teach the AI how to spot patterns and make predictions.
But lacking a consistent, verified version of data, also known as a “single source of truth,” is a major problem because enterprises then are uncertain about what data they should analyze and feed into their AI models.
Spreadsheets are helpful in some contexts, but shouldn’t be responsible for holding mission-critical large enterprise data sets, Cassidy said. Often that ends up happening when an enterprise’s critical data is stored across multiple systems — one system for sales, one for accounting, et cetera — and employees end up downloading it all into spreadsheets just to get it together in one place.
Pointing AI applications at those imperfect data sets can have disastrous consequences, Cassidy said. “You run the risk potentially of garbage in, garbage out.”
An organization’s level of reliance on spreadsheets is somewhat of an indicator for how ready it is to use AI, said Michael Bradshaw, CIO at IT services provider Kyndryl. He said he’s been in meetings spent almost entirely debating discrepancies between various participants’ spreadsheets rather than analyzing the data in question.
“The culture of spreadsheets means you’re not focused on the outcomes. You’re focused on everyone defending their versions of the data,” he said.
A recent study by enterprise planning company Board International found that 55% of organizations were actually doing their enterprise planning — including budgeting and sales forecasting — in spreadsheets.
Technology giant Microsoft, whose AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot is embedded in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, said it is aware of some of the challenges of keeping data in Excel.
Derek Snyder, senior director of Microsoft Copilot, said the company has been adding features to make it easier to audit, update and trace the provenance of information within.
Microsoft said it doesn’t break down usage numbers by specific app, but currently has more than 400 million paid Office 365 seats.
Gerrit Kazmaier, general manager and vice president of data analytics at Google Cloud, said that by using a tool called Connected Sheets, Google users can tap spreadsheets that are always connected to a governed data model, thereby analyzing information against real-time streams of data while avoiding multiple versions of truth.
Alan Rencher, CTO at dental software provider Henry Schein One, said he tries to ensure that no enterprise data actually originates in spreadsheets.
However, there are cultural barriers. “Some employees and leaders want to be the ‘single source of truth’ behind data sets,” he said. “There may be legacy users that are mistrustful of big data systems and want to completely control their data.”
Rencher says the spreadsheet will continue to maintain staying power thanks to a user-friendly interface for quick individual viewing and organizing of information. “On my laptop right now, I think I have 17 Excel spreadsheet tabs open,” he said. “I don’t see it going anywhere. I just don’t.”
